Great Year So Far For Green Monster

No; not this guy. From Patterico:

New York Times:

Americans are broadly concerned about inequality of wealth and income despite an economy that has improved by most measures, a sentiment that is already driving the 2016 presidential contest, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll.

The poll found that a strong majority say that wealth should be more evenly divided and that it is a problem that should be addressed urgently. Nearly six in 10 Americans said government should do more to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor, but they split sharply along partisan lines. Only one-third of Republicans supported a more active government role, versus eight in 10 of Democrats.

Polls and studies have also shown marked increases among Americans in wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, and gluttony.

Yup. But the greatest of these is envy. Because it works best to get Dems to the voting booth.

Kind of Thing I Live For

Check this out. A guy named Ken Ferrigni writes:

My point here is that Peter Jackson and Co. got called out for color-coded casting, responded by firing the person who was doing the casting, and then continued to cast an all white group. So somewhere, in some production meeting, PJ&Co. concluded that total whiteness was essential to the story of the Hobbit. That's fine. But it has to be viewed as a choice. Not as a default. And not as an accident.

I don't know if Ken Ferrigni is a light-skinned human or not. But a man named Matthew Preston responds succinctly:

Hidden Tiger, Crouching Dragon had no black people either. WTF? I was just watching the film thinking 'Why aren't there any black people in this mythical medieval China?' They should've made it like Thor where 1/3rd of the Vikings were white, 1/3rd black and 1/3rd Asian, which looks a lot more realistic and believable.

Mr. Preston also included a picture, so you can decide if he's allowed to be ironic about knee-jerk race-baiting.

Matthew Preston, thanks for making my day.

BTW, I have to say this about Thor. Idris Elba did a fine job playing Heimdall, IMHO. And I don't think they gave that Asian Viking dude, what's his name, enough screen time.

Bill Whittle on the Relative Wealth of the American Poor

...and resentment...



...and envy. Which is worse than greed, BTW.

Chopra and the Green-eyed Monster

Hugh Hewitt pegs Deepak Chopra as a typical leftist without very much to offer except sneers of hatred directed toward Christianity.

Chopra’s rage against mainstream Christianity may have its roots in nothing more complicated than a simple though vast jealousy at Warren’s enormous success, and not just success in selling books but in attracting tens of thousands of pastors and their congregations to a revitalized Christian faith in the new millennium.

Warren’s call, heeded by millions of American Christians, to lead faith-filled lives, to give sacrificially and to work for the alleviation of suffering across the planet has been the focus of astonished applause by intelligent observers across the political spectrum.

Warren’s church and the millions of American Christians who hold similar beliefs and practice similar disciplines model authentic and traditional Christian belief. There isn’t much to hate there, but Chopra and others on the Left want to try to transform mainstream Christian belief in traditional marriage into a postmodern scarlet letter, and they will use the tactics of extremist hate if they have to.

We are not “long past irony” here, just face to face with the unpleasant reality of the Left’s genuine agenda of silencing its opponents.

I'm an Occam's Razor kind of guy, so I agree with Hewitt that most likely it's Rick Warren's success that irks Chopra more than anything. So why doesn't he become a Christian? Then he can make lots more money selling books to American Christians and go to Heaven someday. Oops, that was probably really insensitive of me to say. Sorry.

Van Jones: Green-with-envy Czar?

Another video from Glenn Beck. Here's a short bio on the Green Czar, Van Jones, the ex-con he mentions in my last post.

The line that caught my eye/ear is close to the beginning: "What I do, to kinda make it simple, I'm basically a community organizer inside the federal government." Nice.

Here's what's on the back of his bubble-gum card, also from Beck.

Green Jobs Czar - Van Jones
Title: Special Adviser for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality
Salary: unknown
Reports to: Head of Council on Environmental Quality Nancy Sutley
Appointed: March 2009
Agency or department that might have handled similar issues: Environmental Protection Agency; Labor

• Will focus on environmentally-friendly employment within the administration and boost support for the idea nationwide
• Rose from near obscurity in the Oakland, Calif., grassroots organizing scene to the leader of a national movement to spur the green economy.
• Founded Green For All, an organization focused on creating green jobs in impoverished areas
• Also co-founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and Color of Change, which includes Bay Area PoliceWatch, a group devoted to "protect[ing] the community from police misconduct"
• Published New York Times best-seller The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems, in October 2008
• Started career as a prison-reform advocate in Oakland, Calif., lobbying for reform of the juvenile justice system and youth-violence prevention programs
• Has law degree from Yale
• 2007: worked on the Green Jobs Act with then-Rep. Hilda Solis (D-Calif.), who co-sponsored the bill in the House
• 1993: was arrested at the Los Angeles riots that followed the acquittal of cops in the Rodney King beating. "I was arrested simply for being a police observer," says Jones, who had just graduated from Yale Law School and was working with the Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco.
• 1999: was arrested in the 1999 Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization
• Excerpt from a Nov. 2005 interview in the East Bay Express:
Jones had planned to move to Washington, DC, and had already landed a job and an apartment there. But in jail, he said, "I met all these young radical people of color—I mean really radical, communists and anarchists. And it was, like, 'This is what I need to be a part of.'" Although he already had a plane ticket, he decided to stay in San Francisco. "I spent the next ten years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary." In the months that followed, he let go of any lingering thoughts that he might fit in with the status quo. "I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th, and then the verdicts came down on April 29th," he said. "By August, I was a communist." In 1994, the young activists formed a socialist collective, Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement, or STORM, which held study groups on the theories of Marx and Lenin and dreamed of a multiracial socialist utopia. They protested police brutality and got arrested for crashing through police barricades. In 1996, Jones decided to launch his own operation, which he named the Ella Baker Center after an unsung hero of the civil-rights movement.

JGDS: Jonah Goldberg Derangement Syndrome

I promised a reader of this blog that I'd post on Jonah Goldberg's new book, Liberal Fascism and the gross over-reaction to it from different quarters. It is fascinating to me; before the book was even out, the Amazon page was overrun with the scurrilous attacks of leftists commenting mainly on Goldberg's weight. These were mostly in the form of "tags" placed by teams of determined leftists which you can still see such as "Editor promised cake", "Mmm bacon" and "Cheetohouse Five". As a human being with feelings this might have annoyed him, but it no doubt amused him as an author that an unpublished book was so enraging his liberal detractors that they were behaving like a bunch of fascists before anyone had had a chance to read past the book cover. Besides, Goldberg's physique would resemble Brad Pitt's if you stood him next to Michael Moore, a Buddha-like sage whom I'm sure many of these anger-mongers consider to be a living saint.

Listening to all the interviews on talk radio with Goldberg has made me interested in checking out the book. He talks about how the phrase "liberal fascism" wasn't something he cooked up, but a quote from a speech delivered by H. G. Wells at Oxford in 1932 where Wells made a plea for his version of The New Man: "I am asking for liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis." It seemed to Wells that democracy includes too many people who aren't "with the program"; there needs to be totalitarian control by "elites" to effect the correct Utopian system.

Goldberg goes on explain how Stalin didn't like the nationalism of the socialists of Western Europe so, like a capitalist worried about brand confusion, he wouldn't allow them to use "socialist" to describe themselves. Instead, they had to refer to themselves as fascists.

From listening to him converse freely on his topic and field calls from those hostile to his thesis (on Medved's show) you can tell that the guy has done extensive research on the history linking fascism to leftist ideology. I recall I always had difficulty in school and college discerning the difference between fascists and socialists when we discussed their forms of government, other than the fact that they seemed to hate each other. I was told that in the economic sphere the difference can be stated thusly: in socialism the state owns the means of production, i.e., business ventures, whereas in fascism the state has full control over businesses. It always sounded like a distinction without a real difference to me, dreamed up by liberal academics who wouldn't know a good business plan if it bit them in their tenured asses.

So control versus ownership -- reminds me of the adage "Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?" I'm sure the poor farmer who raised the cow wouldn't see the difference between the two, the state takes all the milk and gives him back 2 gallons a week plus a six of Heineken, or the state takes the cow and then forces him to milk it for them -- since they don't know which end of the cow makes the milk -- paying him a wage of 2 gallons per week plus a fifth of Vodka. Maybe fascism is simply socialism with more cowbell. Or vice versa, with a "Good job, Comrade!" thrown in as a bonus if you aren't one of the ones they kill.

So fascists as the spiritual grandfathers of modern day liberals isn't too much of a stretch for me. Or many others, such as the Anchoress, for example.

I mean, come on... do these Blackshirt blokes look like conservatives? Look more like a bunch of metrosexual John Edwards supporters to me, waiting for the local Whole Foods Market to open.

Anyway, Jonah was quick to point out in all the interviews I heard that he is not accusing all modern day liberals of the horrendous acts of evil which Stalin and Hitler carried out, merely that the tendency to believe in their ideology as an absolute "unified theory" to bring about a bright new age and to curtail individual freedom in order to hasten the realization of this "greater good". And although I haven't heard him state it, I'm sure he wouldn't rule out that fascism does exist within some of the wilder-eyed ranks of the right.

Oh, that reminds me. Speaking of clowns and tricycles, several reader friends have pointed out several small side-shows to the 3-ring circus being put on by those showing the symptoms of the burgeoning mental disorder: Jonah Goldberg Derangement Syndrome. Please feel free to point out warning signs and prescribe treatment and preventive measures.

One warning sign might be linking to a Daily Show youtube video rather than anything substantial. Uhhh... this is a publisher's commercial for the book, OK? Even my 3-year-old can recognize advertising when he sees it and knows that's when you take a bathroom break. And by the way, there is an official blog for Liberal Fascism at National Review. That would be a good thing to read for substance if, say, you can't afford the book.

This is possibly unrelated, but remember when Stephen Morrissey, of all people, was accused of being a fascist? Hey, didn't he write a song called "We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful"?

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(Update: Welcome LF-blog readers. I have the computer geeky habit of putting quotes around my search terms, so when I Googled "Jonah Goldberg Derangement Syndrome" last night nothing came up or I'd have acknowledged the existence of the DS was already known. My abbreviation does distinguish between hatred for that other author guy the left dislikes.)